John McMahon
2 min readOct 15, 2022

--

This plan falls down right from the start. "....gather like-minded people together and make a plan. "And what happens when you find out that some of these people are totally unsuited to living in an intentional community? That they would rather get high and hit on women than do farming or power production? Are you calling in the cops to get rid of them because they are not pulling their weight? The whole thing is over when you are relying on armed police from outside to maintain order. What happens when some people decide that if they are doing more, they should get more?

Farming and building are professions, since neither is easy to do or cheap. Only someone who has never done either would think otherwise. You are going to set up electric. power production on a stream? How do you get the neccessary professionals involved without paying them? If it was easy everyone would be doing it.

The whole sex part is why many intentional communities fail. Cult leaders decide who has sex with who, which is how they maintain control over everyone. Without that kind of guidance, are some people in the community going to remain involuntarily celibate while others are free to have all the sex they want? How is that fair? What happens when two people have an acrimonious break-up? Which one of them has to leave, or will they both stay and yell at each other and divide the community?

You haven't done the proper research or lived collectively, because your assumptions about living this way are childish. People are really complicated, and no one is truly "like minded". People who are well educated, skilled, and have their shit together are not going to live this way. You will end up primarily with people who can't make their life work, and are looking for something to help them. The problem is, everywhere they go, there they are.

Edit: To see how hard this is to do, take a second and consider the food situation. Producing food will be the most crucial thing the community does, since they can't live without it. The community will have to be vegan, vegetarian, or omnivores. No combination can function. Any of the extensive work done to provide eggs, milk, or meat will not benefit the vegans in any way, and of course living in a place where animals are slaughtered would be a problem. Vegetarians might have the same moral dilema with meat, and also not benefit from raising animals for meat. Will the community buy coffee or alcohol, and what about sugar, weed, and tobacco? You literally wouldn't get through the first meal without a long contentious argument. Without tradition or a hierarchy to make rules, even the most trivial issue will require yet another long, unpleasant meeting to resolve. You have to pay me to go to a meeting.

--

--

No responses yet